Network storage devices require high performance to ensure a user or an application experiences fast response or high data throughput from the storage device. Client computers exchange packets with the storage devices where each packet comprises information directed toward a physical storage area. Typically, the information includes addresses, payloads, commands, or other information relevant to interacting with the storage area. High performance network storage solutions imply the various aspects of the solution should also be high performance including processing protocols, interpreting packet information, command resolution, addressing storage areas, or other aspects.
The faster a network storage solution is able to process networking protocols the higher the performance of the solution. Some storage solutions use stateful protocols including TCP or iSCSI over TCP to communicate with network storage devices. Stateful protocols incur overhead when processing packets at high speeds often times requiring additional support systems include TCP Offload Engines (TOE) to improve performance. As networking infrastructure speeds increase, the overhead on stateful processing places greater demands the processing units to maintain state of a communication link. To alleviate the problem of protocol overhead and to improve performance, a network storage solution could employ stateless protocols. Solutions that employ open standard ATA over Ethernet (AoE) use Ethernet as the stateless protocol. Such solutions offer high performance on communication networks; however, the solutions do not offer addressing schemes that can scale to extended network, for example, a LAN, WAN, or the internet using layer 3 routing.
Constituent storage elements of a networks storage solution including clients, storage devices, proxies, or other equipment, should quickly interpret commands to ensure performance of the solution remains high. Traditionally, solutions employ a command protocol imposed on a communication stack. Again, take for example iSCSI where the SCSI command set tunneled over a TCP/IP connection between a client and storage device. This implies, once a storage element receives packet, it must continue to process the command protocol above and beyond protocol processing. Through proper construction of the network storage solution, packet interpretation can be advantageously accelerated by having the communication link processing take some of the responsibilities. Furthermore, communication link processing can aid in the resolution of storage area commands.
In general, network storage solutions provide explicit identifiers (IDs) associated with a physical storage area. For example, a logical volume of storage based on iSCSI has a logical unit number (LUN), or a NAS system has a path or file name on the NAS file server. However, this imposes a completely separate storage area ID translation layer on top of a communication layer when packets are exchanged over a network. The storage device decodes the ID to determine which physical storage area is the target. For example, a LUN refers to a logical volume; however, storage devices resolve the LUN to a disk or a disk partition as a function of other packet information including a logical block address (LBA) or other payload information. Once the address has been translated, the commands must then be interpreted. Therefore it is advantageous to address physical storage areas utilizing networking infrastructure rather than solely using an explicit address or ID because the network itself can help resolve an address to the storage area. Furthermore, it is also advantageous to use physical storage area addresses to help resolve a command targeting the storage area. For example, if an IP address is used as an address for a storage area, network switches or routers find the storage area by directing network storage packets appropriately without using additional extraneous infrastructure to create the storage fabric. The use of IP addresses as storage area addresses is well addressed in co-owned Zetera U.S. patent applications with Ser. Nos. 10/473,713, 10/473,509, 10/47280, and 10/763,099 which are hereby included by reference in their entirety.
Using externally controlled addresses for storage areas provide advantages of scalability because the addresses of storage areas are not necessarily bound to hardware or to physical location. However, the address space can be quite large. For an IPv4 address, there are over 4 billion addresses that could be assigned to a storage area. For an IPv6 address, there are 3.4×1038 addresses that could be assigned to a storage area. Without a storage device knowing a priori what addresses are going to be assigned to its storage areas, the storage device might not be able to assume restrictions on the address space resulting the storage device having to search for the correct storage area through the entire address space. For example, if storage devices manage storage areas having IP addresses from multiple subnets spread evenly the full address space; each storage device can not assume limitations on subnets to reduce the search space thereby consuming memory. Therefore, the storage device requires a fast method for resolving a storage area's address to the storage area context where the method balances memory utilization with speed of resolution.
Consumers of network storage have an insatiable need for storage. In the near future one could reasonably expect that all electronic data, communications, content, or other data will be stored for archival purposes and will not be deleted. Therefore, storage addresses should scale with the storage solutions to support nearly seamless increases in capacity, performance, reliability, recovery, or in other critical characteristics. For example, a logical volume represented by a multicast address could store data on a storage area that individually have addresses comprising one or more segments including the multicast address, LBA, port assignment, time stamp, or other information in a network storage packet. Complex addresses loaded with information are difficult to interpret forcing storage devices to consume CPU time that might be precious on cost sensitive storage devices.
Therefore, there remains a considerable need for apparatus and methods to ensure high performance of network storage solutions. High performance network solutions would comprise the following beneficial elements:                Exchange packets between storage elements and storage areas using a stateless protocol        Modules use addresses within the packets to quickly derive storage area commands without requiring a file system        